“Our worst enemy,” Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself, D. H. Lawrence wrote, in a much-quoted four-line homily that turns out on examination to be free of any but tendentious meaning. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself. This may be what Lawrence (or we) would

Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.

my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation.

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes. and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

For me to imagine what he could say only in my edit would seem obscene, a violation.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

He looked back. Even today I have no idea what made him look back.